Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

He watched her melt into the crowd making their way to the exit, then headed for the transit desk. The song he’d had in his head earlier came back to him.

If he’d managed to understand correctly what they said over the loudspeakers, the flight would take an hour. He fell asleep and didn’t wake up until they landed at Inverness Airport. He walked towards the ancient terminal and registered that the air was fresh and clear — just as he remembered it from Härjedalen. In Sveg, the wooded hillsides surrounding the little town had been a dark, threatening circle. The countryside was different here. High, sharply outlined mountains in the distance to the north, elsewhere fields and heaths, and the sky seemed to be low, almost touchable. He got the key to his rented car, and felt a vague worry about having to drive on the left-hand side of the road. The road was narrow. He was annoyed by the sluggishness of the transmission. He wondered if he should go back and upgrade, but soon gave up on that thought. He wasn’t going far, only to Inverness and back, with perhaps the occasional excursion.

The travel agent had booked him into a hotel called Old Blend for two nights, in the town center. It took him a while to find it. He caused chaos at two rotaries, but could breathe a sigh of relief when he eventually parked outside the hotel, a three-story, dark red brick building. Yet another hotel, but the last one in his quest to find out why Herbert Molin had been murdered. He now knew the circumstances, and he’d met the man who killed him. He didn’t know the whereabouts of the presumed murderer, Fernando Hereira.

Larsson had phoned from Östersund a few days ago and told him that the Swedish police and Interpol had drawn a blank. Presumably he was back in South America by now, using a different name — his real one. Larsson didn’t think they would ever find him. Even if they did, the Swedish authorities would never manage to have him extradited. Larsson promised to keep Lindman informed. He’d also asked about Lindman’s state of health, and been pleased about the latest diagnosis.

“What did I tell you?” he said with a laugh. “You were succumbing to doom and gloom — I’ve never met anybody as depressed as you were.”

“Perhaps you haven’t met many people with a death sentence hanging over their head. Or inside their head, to be more precise. But you had a bullet in your shoulder.”

Larsson turned serious. “I keep wondering if she shot to kill me. I remember the look on her face. I’d like to think that she shot to wound me, but I don’t really believe it.”

“How are you now?”

“A bit stiff in the shoulder, but much better.”

“What about Johansson?”

“I’ve heard that he’s thinking of applying for early retirement. This whole business has hit him hard. I saw him the other day. He looked very thin.” Larsson sighed. “I suppose things could have been much worse.”

“One of these days I’ll take Elena to a bowling alley. I’ll knock over a few pins and think of you.”

“When Molin was killed, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for,” Larsson said. “But what we stumbled upon is something very big. It’s more than a network of Nazi organizations. It’s grounds for facing up to the fact that Fascism is alive and kicking, albeit in a different guise.”

Larsson said that Magnus Holmström’s case would go to trial the following week. He had asserted his right to remain silent, but even so there was enough evidence to convict him and earn him a long jail sentence.

It was over — but there was one connection that Lindman still wanted to look into. He hadn’t mentioned it to Larsson. It was to be found in Inverness. Even if Veronica Molin’s attempt to invent an explanation for her father’s death had failed — the only weak move she’d made during those dramatic weeks — there had in fact been a real person hidden behind the letter “M” in Molin’s diary. Lindman had been helped by a clerical assistant called Evelyn who had worked for the police in Borås for many years. Together they had searched for and eventually found the report on the visit to Borås by a party of British police officers in November 1971, with a list of names. They had even found a photograph on the wall of an archive room. The picture was taken outside the police station. Olausson was there, posing with four British policemen, two of them women. One of the women, the older one, was called Margaret Simmons. Lindman sometimes wondered how much Veronica knew about her father’s visit to Scotland. She hadn’t used the name Margaret when she had tried sending them down a false trail: she’d said the woman’s name was Monica.

Molin was not in the picture, but he had been there. It was then, in November 1971, that he’d met this Margaret; and the following year he’d gone to Scotland to see her and written about her in his diary. They had gone for long walks in Dornoch, a coastal town north of Inverness. Lindman thought that maybe he should see what it looked like, but Margaret Simmons no longer lived there; she had moved when she retired in 1980. Without asking for his reasons, Evelyn had helped Lindman to trace her. In the end, one day in February, just when he started to believe he was going to live and eventually return to work, she called him in triumph and supplied him with an address and a telephone number in Inverness.

And that’s where he was now, and that was as far as his advance planning had gone. He had to decide what to do: should he call, or find the street and knock on her door? She was eighty. She might be ill or tired and not at all willing to receive him.

He was given a friendly welcome by a man with a loud, powerful voice. His was room number 12 on the top floor. There was no elevator, just a creaking staircase and a soft carpet. He could hear a television set somewhere. He climbed to his room, put down his suitcase, and went to the window. Traffic was buzzing around down below, but when he lifted his gaze he could see the sea, the mountains, and the sky. He took two miniature bottles of whiskey from the minibar and emptied them, standing at the window. The feeling of liberation was now even stronger than before. I’m on my way back, he thought. I’m going to survive. When I’m an old man I’ll look on this as a time that changed my life, rather than putting an end to it.

Afternoon turned into evening. He decided to wait until tomorrow before contacting Margaret Simmons. It was drizzling outside. He walked to the harbor, and wandered from pier to pier. He felt impatient. He wanted to start work again. All he had lost was time. But what was time? Anxious breaths, mornings turning into evenings, and then new days? He didn’t know. He thought of those chaotic weeks in Härjedalen when they had first been looking for a murderer, and then for two, as almost unreal. Then came the moment after November 19, when he entered his doctor’s office at 8:15 on the dot, and began his course of radiation. How would he describe that time if he were to write himself a letter? Time had seemed to stand still. He’d lived as if his body were a prison. It wasn’t until mid-January, when he’d put it all behind him, the radiation and the operation, that he’d recovered his grasp of time as something mobile, something that passed by without ever returning.

He had dinner at a restaurant close to the hotel. He’d just been handed a menu when Elena called.

“How’s Scotland?”

“Good. But it’s hard driving on the left.”

“It’s raining here.”

“Here too.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“I’m just about to have dinner.”

“How’s it going with your talks?”

“I’ve done nothing about that today. I’m starting tomorrow.”